To continue this series on laptops in the classroom (see parts one and two) . . . There is another issue here and that is whether we need to change the way we teach rather than ban laptops. Both Chris and Tim mention it: even the lecture shouldn’t be a straight lecture, but should encourage active student learning. I’m a bit on the fence.

Before UCLA, I had never experienced discussion sections. The big classes at UCLA have large lecture halls (somewhere between 120-300 students or so) with smaller sections that meet once per week for discussion (around 15-25 students, depending on the department). So, I would like to agree with Chris and Tim about the need to change the passive lecture into a more active learning experience, but I would like to qualify it a bit:

In a class like those at UCLA (lecture sessions + discussion sessions), there seems no real point in making the lecture into something reserved for the discussion sessions — where active learning can be much more effective. On the other hand, the lecturer should work hard to be animated and to speak in a conversational style. As an avid podcast listener (and a former high school thespian), I am a firm advocate for the power of the spoken word.

The lecture need not be a dictation-transcription sort of relationship. Make it fun! I think the lecture should tell a story in a way that excites the presenter. Occasionally, students could be called up to volunteer and act out some sort of historical scene or to model the manner of statues in a particular age or the like. But the focus of the lecture should, I think, be on the transferal of information in an engaging way. I do not believe the lecture is dead yet, even if John Cleese is carrying it over his shoulder trying to toss it on the cart for the dead.

For a large course without discussion sections (over 50 or so), it’s difficult to create an environment of active participation. One of my Fuller profs handled it well by assigning small groups that would share electronic responses with each other each week. Another Fuller prof handled it by creating small groups that would consistently meet together as a portion of the long class time each week. I like both approaches.

I may have appreciated the course content in large lecture classes otherwise, but my learning experience suffered if the professors made absolutely no attempt at connecting the students in any sort of meaningful way. Having a few people speak up in response to questions during large lectures usually descends into having a handful of outspoken students “ask questions” that are mini-lectures in themselves to show off their “intellect.”

For a survey course with a smaller amount of students (under 30-40 or so), it still seems to me that some sort of “lecturing” needs to occur. It is a class surveying material and I believe that students should have someone who can ably guide them through that material. Again, the lecture need not be dull. But the smaller classroom, even if it needs to have some sort of basis in information review, also allows for more active classroom activity: small group tasks, debates, and the like.

For a seminar type classroom (maybe 5-15 or so), I believe there should be very minimal “lecturing” (aside from the occasional rant about some perspective or approach of the material) and mostly student discussion.

What happens to the laptop in all this? I believe there is a place for the laptop in all of these environments. In the lecture course, as an educator, I don’t want to babysit students. It’s really impossible to enforce rules about laptop usage unless you want to ban the laptop (and as I’ve noted in the past two posts, I don’t want to ban the laptop). Making your TAs enforce laptop usage is really unfair to the TA’s and makes them into police rather than educators. The policing can even be more distracting than the inappropriate laptop usage.

So, as I’ve noted in this little series, I think for lectures we need to treat students like adults and let them do as they will with their laptops. I think I like the idea of asking students who plan to distract themselves sit in the back, as one Fuller professor did. As the classroom sizes descend smaller into more discussion based sessions, I still believe laptops have a place, even if it needs to be regulated a bit (like taking a point off their final grade for inappropriate laptop use as I do).

Sharing my own experience, I would like to follow-up from my earlier post on what to do about laptops in the classroom. I feel like I’m embedded in the generational transition into this technological problem. I am part of the “in between”. When I was an undergrad, nobody brought laptops to class — even my senior year (2002). After three years had passed and I entered seminary (2005), everybody had a laptop in class (all but a very, very small minority). From what I’ve seen, UCLA students are somewhere in between (though, my wife tells me that her Master of Public Health classes at UCLA had about the same laptop numbers as my Fuller Seminary experience).

From what I can see, there are at least two types of classrooms that need to be addressed: the lecture hall and the discussion classroom. So, here’s a bit about my own time in both:

Taking notes in lecture. I was not the ideal student as an undergrad. Let’s not go into too many of those details, but one of my problems was my entry into the digital age before it really took off in the classroom. For me, taking notes in class by hand felt so useless because I couldn’t search for things later. Relatedly, I was terrible at organizing papers, whereas I’m great at organizing things on my laptop. After the semester ended, both problems escalated: there was no way I was going to be able to control dozens of pieces of paper from each class each semester in any useful manner. Taking notes on paper just seemed (and still seems) futile to me. The notes I have taken on my laptop as a graduate student, however, have been invaluable, even years later. “I remember David Scholer mentioning some interesting Greco-Roman parallel to the Lukan prologue . . . what was that? . . . [searching files] . . . ah, yes, there it is. . . .”

I also tend to agree with the college student from the NPR story I mentioned last time: “‘It’s like high school. I mean we’re college students. I mean we’re paying tuition to come here, a lot of tuition to come here. We shouldn’t be treated like we’re elementary school students.” Yes, laptop computers (particularly when connected to the internet) are a bit risk for distraction. But in the lecture class (I’m talking somewhere over 50 students), I think students need to make the decision for themselves. If they decide to play Farmville instead of listening to the lecture on the agricultural revolution, they will probably get lower points on the exams. They should be free to make that choice, as long as distractions to others can be limited.

Laptops in the discussion-based classroom. Jared believes that laptops should be banned in discussion classrooms, while Chris believes we should be leveraging student attachments to technology. In my discussion sections at UCLA, I have found that there aren’t enough students with laptops to really leverage their presence as Chris suggests. But I am far from coming to Jared’s conclusion. I suppose it is from my own experience as a student. I can’t imagine myself without my Bible software in a doctoral seminar on, say, Deuteronomy. The extreme ease of going from one passage to another to a ancient near eastern inscription to a commentary to a lexicon to a Bible dictionary, etc., makes discussion so much more enriching. Not to mention how helpful it is to take notes on my laptop, as mentioned earlier.

While the undergraduate class on Western Civilization that I teach doesn’t need to be jumping around so much, it may help them to search for a key term in the primary documents we read for that week or to jot down some notes from the discussion. Perhaps even jot down a question before they ask it and then write down any responses to it after they ask the question.

Since attention is so essential in creating an effective discussion environment, I still deter nonessential laptop use by penalizing students’ grades. None of this frivolous “bring donuts in for everyone next time if your phone rings” stuff. If you’re messing around with the laptop, texting on your phone, or even doing the old school newspaper reading, you get one point off on your final grade each time. So, I may not ban laptops, but I have found that my policy (and my demonstration that I mean what I say) allows for a healthier laptop-to-discussion-classroom relationship. And I still (usually) have excellent participation.

Okay, I still have more to say, but I’ll will leave that for a “part three” to come, addressing different teaching methods we might take for different types of classrooms . . .